Liaison, incident review and a Boosh encounter.

Another busy day of meetings yesterday. First thing an internal communications group, having a forward look at our corporate comms, then a strategic liaison meeting with the Faculty of Medicine Dentistry and Health. we have two strategic liaison meetings with each faculty every year, and as this one was at the beginning of the planning round, we share information about our respective developments. We covered a number of topics, including the VLE upgrade, particularly significant here because the Medical School uses a different VLE to the rest of the University and we need to make sure it is as integrated as possible. This faculty also has a number of non standard students - distance learners, part time, off campus, CPD - and we had a long discussion about the problems we seem to have dealing with their registration, computer account production etc. It involves a number of different departments and requires a thorough overhaul, including getting away from bits of paper being processed. Hopefully it will be one of our first LEAN projects.

Then a quick dash from the Medical School to an incident review meeting to look at the problems we experienced during Freshers Week with on line registration, computer account production, the main web server, uSpace - you name it, it seemed at one point as though everything that could go wrong, did. Not a good week, but some excellent team work and very hard work by many people to make sure everything got completed. We had a good look at what had happened and why, what things were connected and what coincidental, and what we can do to stop it happening again. We need to move as many processes as possible to being carried out by the students, before they arrive and we'll have to accelerate development of our applicant portal and registration rewrite. As well as a major review of the business processes of course.

Now I'm on the train on the way to Brighton to the CISG conference, and Noel Fielding is in my carriage. Brightened the journey up immensely. Wonder if I should ask him if he likes my cowboy boots....

Break Even

Exec Meeting on first day back - main item on agenda was the year-end out turn and how we'd done against our budget last year. By some miracle (or was it good financial planning and management....) we've just about broken even, and have a very small surplus to carry forward to this year. Yes, some areas have overspent, and some underspent, but overall the position is excellent, despite having a very large saving to make. It's been difficult, but we managed it. Now we're planning this year's spend and our priority is staffing as we're aware that some areas are very understaffed, with some of our key services relying on the expertise of sometimes a single person.

Other things we discussed included our progress and policy on our move to Office 2007 (or 2008 if you're a mac user like me). We've agreed that we will move all of our managed machines over by January 2009 (student open access ones will be done by the start of term), and staff who run an unmanaged machine will be encouraged to upgrade by the same date.

A new project on the horizon is a replacement of our existing UCard which already brings many functions together, but we want to replace it with a more intelligent one which will replace all existing ones. This will be a big project, with a significant cost, but hopefully will bring benefits. Of course, with our benefits realisation system, if it won't, then we won't do it!

As an aside, and nothing to do with work, as I write this, I'm nibbling sweet tobacco. No, I haven't suddenly taken up chewing a nicotine related substance, but while I as in Whitby last week I visited an old fashioned sweet stall. It was fantastic, selling loads of stuff I remembered from my childhood and haven't seen for years (I bought several sherbet dabs), including sweet tobacco. Suspect it's just lots of sugar and coconut, but it's great. Not sure I've ever washed it down with white wine before though. Anyone else remember it ?